The Only Good Indians(25)

“You’ll dig him up?” the second officer asks, holstering his pistol.

“I can,” Lewis says, toeing at the loose dirt of the obvious mound.

“You’re supposed to have a permit to bury on private property,” the first officer says. “Otherwise everybody buries their pets down at the park, or in their neighbor’s lawn, because they don’t want to mess their own grass up.”

Lewis looks up to the tracks on their long spine of gravel-skinned earth, says, “Think BNSF cares?”

“We’ll make the necessary inquiries,” the first officer says, his pistol holstered now as well.

“Fine,” Lewis says.

“We might need to see the animal, too,” the second officer says. “To confirm.”

“That he’s dead?” Lewis asks.

“That you’re not hiding him,” the second officer says.

“Unless you want to grant us permission to inspect your house,” the first officer says.

Lewis hiccups half a laugh out, shakes his head no-thank-you to that home inspection. Just on principle.

“He was a barker,” he says, about Harley. “You’d have heard him when your car pulled up.”

“We’ll be back soon,” the first officer assures Lewis. “Either with the proper documents to perform a comprehensive search, or with the railroad’s reply.”

“Or to dig my dead dog up,” Lewis adds, stupid Indian that he is.

“That, too,” the second officer says, and then the three of them are walking back to where this started.

Lewis sits back down on the purple milk crate beside the Road King.

“Shouldn’t you be at work?” the second officer says in farewell, his chrome shades already back on.

Lewis shrugs, is leaned down into the frame of the Road King again, rolling a vacuum tube for pliancy.

“Anything you want to tell us, sir?” the first asks.

“I miss my dog, yeah,” Lewis says, and like those were the magic words, the patrol car is easing away. They’re coming back, though. Because cops are exactly what Lewis needs in his life. His thinking is already twitchy enough without having to act all law-abiding for them.

He goes inside for a sandwich, eats it standing over the sink so as not to crumb the place up, and when he comes back to the Road King, two of the books he loaned Shaney are on the purple crate, like she showed up in the garage while he was leaning against the kitchen counter shaking Fritos into his mouth from the bag. He picks the two paperbacks up, studies the spines. The first two in the series. He grins a little, maybe the first time he’s smiled in two or three days. He wishes he could go back, read them all over again for the first time. He wishes he had the concentration for reading at all, right now.

Instead, what he can’t stop thinking, it’s why now? Why did this elk, if it is an elk, why did she wait so long to come for him? Was it so he could have time to cobble a life together, get people and things he cares about, so she could take them away the same way he took her calf from her? But why start with him, not with Gabe and Cass? Not that he wishes any kind of ill on them, but if she’s from the reservation, well: That’s where they are, right? Why trek all the way down here first? And Ricky doesn’t factor in, since he died just a few months after Lewis left, and it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, just another Indian beaten to death outside a bar.

The only part that makes sense, Lewis supposes, it’s starting with the dog. It’s what serial killers and monsters always do, since dogs bark the alarm, dogs know there’s some shape standing over there in the shadow.

But how, right? How did she do it?

Does she, like, inhabit random people to do her bidding or something? Could she have snagged some kid bopping down the road after lights-out, gotten him or her to weasel through that four-inch space under the garage door and go to town on Harley with a mallet?

But none of Lewis’s mallets have heads that big. And what happened to Harley looked sort of like elk hooves.

Lewis stands, studies the garage with this possibility in mind.

What else could have done this to Harley, right?

“Post driver,” he says, drifting over to it in the corner. It’s the kind you need two hands and your whole body for. The kind that should be over in the corner with the T-posts, since that’s what it goes with.

Lewis doesn’t want to lift it, see the business end, but he has to.

It’s clean, pristine, even has delicate flakes of rust-backed paint just hanging on, flakes that no way could have stayed there while crushing a dog to death with ten or twenty heavy blows.

A quart paint can, maybe? Those are hand-sized, could do the job. Lewis inspects all of them as well, even the ones that are light, obviously dried up. Nothing.

“You’re being stupid,” he tells himself, and sits down hard on the concrete step leading up to the kitchen door, pulls the mallet from its hook on the side of the rolling tool chest, bounces its butt between his feet.

The mallet is clean, too. For a mallet.

Of course an elk can’t “inhabit” a person. That person would fall over onto all fours and probably instantly panic. Unless she’s like that shadow he saw in the living room. Woman body, elk head, no horns.

That’s all he’s really got, though: a shadow he probably saw wrong, and something he thought he saw through the spinning blades of a fan.